Mississippi Children's Choir - His Eye Is On The Sparrow -

Holiday Music - Fiona Bernard

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Hello Again to our friends in Cuba. Today, December 17, 2014, we normalize relations. History has absolved Fidel Castro.

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Cuba was used by the U.S. as a haven for gambling, alcohol, prostitution, and corruption.  Much of it was run by the Mafia with the aide of the puppet president Batista.  Fidel Castro led an uprising of Cuban people to try to overthrow Batista with an attack on a military base called the Moncada, but that initial effort was unsuccessful.

 

In 1953, Fidel Castro was put on trial and convicted.  He gave his own closing statement at the end of the trial, what is now called "History Will Absolve Me," a speech as famous in the world as the Martin Luther King, Jr. speech "I Have A Dream."  Today, December 17, 2014, the U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced that the U.S. and Cuba will renew diplomatic relations, and try to move forward as friendly neighbors. 

What were the revolutionary proposals of Castro?  Turn control of much of the land over to peasant and tenant farmers.  Give every single worker 30% of the profits of any large business in which they work.  Confiscate the wealth of those who have acquired their wealth through crime and fraud.  Use the money taken from the rich to fund retirement programs for all Cubans, hospitals, and other charitable organizations.

 http://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm

 

Excerpts from "History Will Absolve Me": 

In terms of struggle, when we talk about people we're talking about the six hundred thousand Cubans without work, who want to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate from their homeland in search of a livelihood; the five hundred thousand farm laborers who live in miserable shacks, who work four months of the year and starve the rest, sharing their misery with their children, who don't have an inch of land to till and whose existence would move any heart not made of stone; the four hundred thousand industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose benefits are being taken away, whose homes are wretched quarters, whose salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender, whose future is a pay reduction and dismissal, whose life is endless work and whose only rest is the tomb; .... 

"... the one hundred thousand small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs, looking at it with the sadness of Moses gazing at the promised land, to die without ever owning it, who like feudal serfs have to pay for the use of their parcel of land by giving up a portion of its produce, who cannot love it, improve it, beautify it nor plant a cedar or an orange tree on it because they never know when a sheriff will come with the rural guard to evict them from it; the thirty thousand teachers and professors who are so devoted, dedicated and so necessary to the better destiny of future generations and who are so badly treated and paid; the twenty thousand small business men weighed down by debts, ruined by the crisis and harangued by a plague of grafting and venal officials; the ten thousand young professional people: doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, school teachers, dentists, pharmacists, newspapermen, painters, sculptors, etc., who finish school with their degrees anxious to work and full of hope, only to find themselves at a dead end, all doors closed to them, and where no ears hear their clamor or supplication."

These are the people, the ones who know misfortune and, therefore, are capable of fighting with limitless courage! To these people whose desperate roads through life have been paved with the bricks of betrayal and false promises, we were not going to say: 'We will give you ...' but rather: 'Here it is, now fight for it with everything you have, so that liberty and happiness may be yours!'

 

 

What Child Is This? (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner)

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All across the United States, citizens are now called "enemies," oppression is called "homeland security," and murder of citizens is called "justified."  The biggest targets, as has always been true, are black males.  When they are murdered by cops, the politicians, the media, the officials of government all rally round the police, even send the killers money.  Because they want black men to be killed.  It's a way to keep them in line.  Why do they need to go outside, anyway?  Southern lynchings, plantation beatings, have nothing on the modern U.S. police state which simply guns down black men in the streets, then lies about it, claiming they had a weapon, or at least the package of cigarettes looked like a weapon. 
 

 

 

Anyone who speaks up to protest the murders will be attacked.  Andrew Hawkins, a black football player, wore a T-shirt with the names of just two of the most recent murder victims, gunned down by the cops in his community.  He was attacked.  The police union spokesman came out and demanded that his team apologize to the police.  I think the police should apologize to the citizens, for murdering so many unarmed black children, including the two named on Hawkins' T-shirt:  Tamir Rice (12) and John Crawford III (22).  Both black, both unarmed.  Both murdered by the police.

 

The police spokesman said that if citizens want to know how to avoid getting shot and killed by a cop, they should just listen to the orders from the cops, and do what they are told.  This guy's got it all backwards.  I have no duty to obey orders from the police.  Put differently, the police have no right to order me around, to tell me where to stand or walk, or what to say.  Or what T-shirt I can wear.  They are confused.  They seem to think this is a police state, a dictatorship, in which the citizens are enemies, and the police are working in a free-fire zone with authorization to gun us down if they don't like where we choose to walk.  Or what T-shirts we put on in the morning.

 

 

It didn't start with Emmett Till, but his name frequently is raised by people beginning to make connections, beginning to realize that when the politicians tell us how much things have changed, how much better we are -- it's just a bunch of lies. 

 

 

We heard the details about Trayvon Martin, that young boy who walked to the store to get a soda and some candy, and was stalked, terrorized, pursued, and gunned down in cold blood by yet another deranged racist thug member of the police state.  At least that cop, Zimmerman, was put on trial, although he was acquitted by the racist jurors who seemed to agree with Zimmerman's view that black people are scary, so it's best to just kill them.  Trayvon Martin wore a sweatshirt with a hoodie when he walked home from the store, with his can of soda and bag of fruit candy.  Some commentators suggested that he deserved to be killed because a black male in a hoodie is just too darned scary.

 

 

Michael Brown was murdered by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, for walking in the street.  It used to be that "driving while black" was considered a crime.  Now walking is too.  The cop who killed him shot over and over again at the unarmed young Michael Brown, who was running away at the time.  Then the cop and the local prosecutor worked together to make sure the cop would not be indicted, make it harder for the Brown family to sue the city.  They claimed that Brown was the aggressor -- Michael Brown, unarmed, was "charging" the cop.  This story was fed to the grand jury by Witness No. 40, who is a crazy racist white lady cop groupie who volunteered delusional and patently false testimony to help out the cop.  After the cop shot Michael Brown, they left his body lying in the street for four hours.  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/15/1351532/-Witness-40-The-Rest-of-the-Story-All-the-Way-to-the-Bottom-of-the-Bus?detail=hide#

 

Eric Garner was a little older than the others, at 43.  Looked kind of like a big teddy-bear.  Not a violent person at all.  Just selling single cigarettes on the corner in State Island when some racist, brutal, aggressive, sick little prick of a cop jumped on Garner's back, grabbed from behind in a choke-hold, while five other cops grabbed from the front, drug him to the ground while he gasped eleven times "I can't breathe; I can't breathe."  He couldn't breathe because the cop had him in a choke-hold, and they sat on top of him, and he had asthma.  So he died right there on the street.  That cop wasn't even charged with anything.  He says he's really sorry about that.  But he's not. 

 

 

 Akai Gurley, 28, was just gunned down in his own apartment building.  Unarmed.  Again, his crime was walking while black.   Walking down the stairs.  When the cops saw him, a black man, they just shot him.  Because he's black, and that's just too scary.  They wouldn't have shot him if he was white.

 

Tamir Rice and John Crawford III were the two names on Andrew Hawkins' (the football player) T-shirt.  Tamir was a 12 year old little boy sitting in a park all by himself, playing, wandering around, with a toy gun.  Two cops drove up and shot him dead.  In Cleveland, Ohio.  They never gave him a chance.  Just shot him dead, that little boy.  John Crawford III was 22, inside a Wal-Mart playing with the toys in their toy aisle.  Some security guards saw him and shot him dead.  Also in Ohio -- this one in Dayton.

 

I won't take the time to write about Sean Bell, the young man murdered by police in Brooklyn the night before his wedding.  Unarmed, at a bachelor's party with his friends.  The police opened fire and killed him.  Amadou Diallo, also gunned down by the police, unarmed.  Abner Louima was drug to the police department and taken into a cell by a gang of cops and repeatedly raped, anally, with a broom stick.  The cops stuck items up his ass, raping him as punishment for being black. 

 

The official word out of government is that we need to find a way for the police and communities to learn to respect each other.  That's their conclusion?  How stupid are these people, or how stupid do they think we are?  This isn't a question of somebody forgot to say please-and-thank-you.  This is mass, institutionalized murder of citizens who have been defined as being enemies of the state.  This is police out of control, believing the hype from D.C. that their job is to protect the "Homeland" from its enemies, which includes all the citizens of this country.  They've got it all backwards. 

 

The job of any government employee, which includes cops, politicians and prosecutors, is to protect us, which means protecting us from corporations who take our jobs to other countries.  Protecting us from corrupt politicians who take bribes to allow corporations to do what they like.  Protect us from financial predators who steal our homes, jack up the rents, throw too many of us out onto the streets.  Protect us from cops who gun down citizens in cold blood and get away with it.  We don't need more manners.  We need jobs, housing, an investment in infrastructure, an increase in minimum wage, education, and free healthcare.  And we need justice. 

 

We're All Palestinians Now

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            Don't bother paying a financial adviser to tell you how to get rich.  Just do what the white European Jewish invaders of Palestine do:  steal everything, lie about it, and kill anyone who tries to stop you.  That is, in a nutshell, the history of modern-day Israel.  The rest is just details.  Unfortunately, this same blueprint is now being used inside the U.S. by groups of rich white men who are stealing our national treasures starting with stealing our cities, lying about it, and killing anyone who gets in their way, anyone who "does not belong."  Just ask Michael Brown or Eric Garner. 

            Going back to 1948, some white European Jewish men (calling themselves "zionists") decided they could probably get away with stealing land in Palestine because (1) so many Jews had just been killed in Europe, so the world felt a little guilty; and (2) who cares about a bunch of Arabs anyway?  The European invaders and thieves bet right.  They attacked a series of villages and towns throughout Palestine, brutalized the people, engaged in barbaric slaughter to terrorize the citizens, ran them out, then proclaimed to the world that the land belonged to the Jews and to nobody else.

            Since that time, Israel has stolen most of the rest of the land of Palestine, using the same formula time and again.  First, they proclaim that God intends them to have the land.  Then they knock down the homes and buildings, run off the people who live there, build walls to prevent the remaining residents from having access to jobs, land, sustenance, and wait for them to leave.  Or die.

            Did anyone believe the zionists really had a longing to own some desert in the middle east, or that is the be-all and end-all of their ambitions?  A little piece of desert to call home?  Of course not.  They have perfected the formula inside Palestine, and now they, and their friends, are applying it throughout the world.

            When we look at Chicago, with Rahm Emanuel at the head, what comes to mind?  He is shutting down public schools, eliminating public services to poor, black neighborhoods.  For what purpose?  Apparently to push the poor black people out of the city so their neighborhoods can be taken over and "redeveloped," taken over by real estate developers, and flipped for billions in profits.  http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/December-2014/Why-Have-Poor-Neighborhoods-Grown-So-Much-in-the-Last-40-Years/

 

            Look at New York City.  It is no longer a city that belongs to the people of the U.S.  The blueprint has been applied to NYC, neighborhood by neighborhood, buildings taken over and removed from rent control by "privatizing" rental units through condo and co-op conversion.  Then the rents are jerked up so that entire areas are unaffordable, and the poor people (including the black and hispanics) are forced out of the city.  Temporarily, they may find rentals in Brooklyn or Queens, but those properties are next.  Brooklyn, in fact, has now become more unaffordable, as one neighborhood after the next is taken over by developers and the working people are forced out.  This is ethnic cleansing without a sole racial focus, since anyone who is not rich is forced out.  These redevelopment plans are financed partly by the city, by government funds, which are essentially used to benefit the rich who are forcing out everyone else.   http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/27/us/gentrification-american-cities/index.html

            Look at Detroit.  First, the Wall Street-run "free trade" associations wrote up a law that would ban tariffs, and encourage U.S. corporations to take American jobs to third world countries to be done by slave, child, and prison labor.  The jobs were taken away, which means the tax base of the city is gone.  The city has more social service costs are more of the residents are in need of assistance, so Wall Street moves in, makes government loans, then throws the city into bankruptcy and "forecloses" on everything.

 

            Most of the people of Detroit have been driven out of that city.  For the few who remain, those who are too poor to move, the sick, the elderly, the city is shutting off residential water, just like Israel shut off electricity, blockaded the water access, restricts fishing, bans Palestinians from having access to the land where they grow food, and restrict food imports, to either force the Palestinians to leave or to kill them off. 

 

            Every ruined neighborhood, each dilapidated home, represents one family whose life has been destroyed by Wall Street and the U.S. politicians it owns.  Detroit once was a successful manufacturing hub, a place where people could find decent-paying jobs that allowed them to buy a home, send their kids to school, participate in our country with hope for the future.  All of that has been taken destroyed by Wall Street.  http://desertedplaces.blogspot.com/2012/07/abandoned-houses-in-detroit.html

http://www.forgottendetroit.com/blog/

            It's working.  So many people have left Detroit now that the plan is near success.  Wall Street funds, investors representing rich people, including Israelis, are moving in and buying up whole blocks of buildings in Detroit, so it can be re-built, and all the value of that city, all the land and the homes, driven into ruin by these predators, will now be stolen by the same vultures.

 

            What were the alternatives, by the way?  The same thing the federal government did to save the banks, save the rich, save Wall Street:  help them.  Save Detroit, a major American city.  Save the people of that city.  Their jobs have been taken away, so the government should move in, create tribunals to get the community involved in laying out plans for the future.  If the people need training, then set up more community colleges and give them training.  The federal government could certainly provide incentives to businesses and industries to locate to Detroit.  We need solar and wind, so why not build it in Detroit?  These things could have happened, and should have happened.  Instead of the U.S. government giving away billions of dollars of working people's money to guarantee the bonuses of the scum that run Goldman-Sachs, they should have helped the rest of us. But they didn't.    

            It's also happening in San Francisco.  Same blueprint, same pattern.  They take over housing, eliminate rent control, drive the working people out.  People who have lived in San Francisco for decades are forced to leave, often in old age, because their building has been bought by some speculator. 

It is a simple matter, by the way, to stop this devastation of the lives of the majority of the American people.  First, all cities must have a large percentage of housing subject to rent control, regardless if the unit is owned by a hedge fund or by an individual.  Second, we need a living wage for all our people regardless of where they live.  And third, we need a full employment law so that any American who is willing and able is guaranteed a job. 

            The major cities of this country are being taken over by the rich, and U.S. working people are being driven out into the suburbs.  All of the benefits of the cities which were funded by working people -- the schools, public transportation, hospitals, culture, art, museums -- are being seized by the rich, while the rest of us are forced to move further out of the cities, into the impoverished suburbs.  The suburbs are now becoming the centers of poverty and crime.  The rich, with the wealth they stole from the rest of us, will not suffer from the problems, and will not contribute to improve the lives of people in the suburbs because they don't live there anymore.  They are turning our major cities into gated communities from which we are excluded.  Don't be surprised if there are armed police patrolling the borders, in time, to keep us out unless we have a special permit to enter. 

            We're all Palestinians now. 

JP Morgan pumping $100 million into buying up Detroit real estate:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/08/15/jpmorgan-is-betting-100-million-on-detroit-can-it-leverage-a-lot-more/

Grand Rapids real estate investor representing Wall Street and Israel hedge funds buying up local properties:  http://www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/index.ssf/2014/05/grand_rapids_real_estate_marke_1.html

December 4, 1969, forty-five years ago today, black panther members Fred Hampton (21) and Mark Clark (22) were murdered in their sleep by the Chicago police.

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Mike Brown Lynched Again.

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Mike Brown, a teenager from Ferguson Missouri, was shot down and killed in the streets of his small town this summer, shot by a cop.  12 bullets to make sure Mike Brown was dead, as he walked home.  Mike Brown was black, and the cop was white, as was the prosecutor who just convinced a grand jury that the cop should go free, no charges, no trial, no consequences whatsoever to his decision to shoot and kill an unarmed teenager. 

The killing of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood wannabe-cop, and the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson Missouri by an actual cop, has drawn the attention of the nation, and perhaps the world.  It shouldn't.  One black man is killed in the U.S., by the police, every 28 hours.  It's almost a daily occurrence.    https://mxgm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Operation-Ghetto-Storm.pdf

The black population in this country is being re-enslaved.  Their schools are allowed to deteriorate, and sometimes completely shuttered, because our society does not need to educate black people.  There are no jobs for them, no place for them to go, so why bother. 

Their jobs (along with those of many white people) have been sent to China.  Wall Street and the corporations like using slave, child, and prison labor in China.  It allows them to make goods very cheaply.  All that was needed was to bribe the U.S. politicians to allow them to import those goods back into the U.S., to sell in this country.  The politicians took the bribes and passed the laws written by Wall Street and deceptively called "Free Trade" laws, so now we have high unemployment, low wages, and an entire sector of our society that is treated by those in power as refuse.  There's simply no use for them.  Nowhere to put them, no reason to educate them.  No jobs.  No opportunity.  No hope. 

Some of them are simply left to live out their lives in extreme poverty, with horrible food, no healthcare or dental, no public transportation, dilapidated housing that barely keeps the snow off in the winter.  They are unhealthy, and they die young.  Some of them turn to crime at the lowest level (not like Wall Street crime, where the biggest players, those who own our government, steal billions of dollars from working people and get away with it).  Poor people engage in low level petty crime.  Maybe they steal some cigarettes.  Some of them are framed, and many of them at put into prison, over and over again.  The end.  No life after that.

Some of them are just murdered.  Shot down cold by the police or by other racists.  They are demonized, myths spread throughout the nation about the super-badass black guy, so strong not even a tank could stop him, not even the 12 bullets fired by the Ferguson cop into the body of the teen Michael Brown would be enough to stop this monstrous rampage, or so the cop claims.  Godzilla, according to him, lurching towards him (the cop had the gun, so why he was scared?  Mike Brown was unarmed.)  A demon, the cop says.  So, the cop explains, you see, he had no choice but to kill.  Or so he testified before the grand jury, with the full protection of the local prosecutor, another white man.  Just guys bein guys, covering each other's back. 

Mike Brown's friend, an eye witness, testified that Mike Brown had his hands in the air and was screaming "Don't Shoot."  This is after the cop had already fired several times.  He fired 12 times in all at the unarmed teenager.  Made sure he got him dead.  Now people all over the country, when they walk by a cop car, put their hands up and say:  "Hands Up.  Don't Shoot."   They don't want some cop getting all scared and killing them.  Like happened to Mike Brown, according to the cop.  I don't think the cop was scared.  I think he's just a racist.

 

 

This white cop goes free.  He just killed a black teenager, an unarmed black teenager, lied about it, and now much of the nation is rallying to his defense.  They're actually sending him money.  This is a new way to get rich.  If you can't win the lottery, go out and murder a young black male.  It's very lucrative.  George Zimmerman got money sent to him too, by other racists who supported him in murdering Trayvon Martin.

The black president tells people to stop breaking windows.  I wish he would tell the police to stop killing black males.  The black president tells us that the police have a duty to protect the property, the windows, the glass.  Don't they have a duty to protect the people, too?  When they start killing the people instead of protecting them, doesn't that deserve a word or two from the black president?

We used to have black lynchings, hangings, to control black men, terrorize the black population.  Make the poor whites happy to see somebody else having a shitty life other than them.  Supposedly we don't do that stuff anymore.  I'm not so sure.

 

 

Then we had J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I., who targeted, framed, imprisoned, murdered black men and women who were politically active.  Meaning they demanded equal rights.

Today, nothing so fancy.  We just shoot them down in the streets, like rabid dogs, and everybody in a position of power says nonsense like "we must respect the grand jury."  Why on earth would anyone respect a jury that acquits white men who murder black men whose only crime is walking down the street where they live.

Okay, I'm being unfair.  Trayvon Martin's "crime" apparently is that he wore a hoody.  According to Geraldo Rivera, he was practically asking for it, wearing a hoody.  Who knew?

 

 

 

Michael Brown's crime is that he shoplifted some cigarettes.  Executed for shoplifting.  Can you imagine if it was the 16 year old very white, upper middle class Taylor and her bff Brittany who shoplifted, then were gunned down by a local police on the way home?  Shoplifting cigarettes.  White kids aren't murdered for shoplifting cigarettes.

 

This cop in Ferguson should have been indicted, and there should have been a public trial.  These secret trials which have become so popular in this country, secret trials for "terrorists," secret trials for getting wiretaps on every phone in America, secret everything.  When the government keeps the public out, keeps things a secret from us, then we have arrived.  This is a police state.  They do what they want, they kill and imprison who they want, they spy on all of us, and they hold secret trials.  Like the grand jury in Ferguson.  Throw the remnants of our legal system in the garbage, along with the laws which our government officials routinely disregard.  The President has a kill list on which he lists people, including Americans, that he claims he can have killed at any time, no arrest, no charges, no right to counsel or appeal, no trial, no examining witnesses, just kill them.  I guess this white cop in Ferguson had a kill list too.

 

Of course a few people rioted after it was announced that the cop would go free.  The U.S. attorney general said something about the need to "study" the crowds, try to figure out how to stop people from being violent when they protest against having their children murdered by cops.  Good luck on that one, bud. 

 

How to end this?  Redistribution of wealth.  The ruling classes in this country, Wall Street, the corporations, the politicians they own, have stolen almost everything of value, and left the rest of us with less of everything, less income, less security, less education, less opportunity, less hope, nowhere to turn and no way out.  They think they can keep squeezing us and we'll be obedient, quietly go to our graves.  Not likely. 

 

What we need is to radically redistribute wealth in this country, most of which is stolen in any event.  Pass a wealth tax, a financial transaction tax.  Tax the rich 90% of their income and capital gains, and use that money to create good jobs rebuilding our infrastructure, schools, public transportation.  Build nonprofit facilities for the old and sick to replace the death traps called nursing homes.  Broken glass is not really a crisis.  Broken people is the problem.

 

"What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth.  Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
 

Bobby Short

Only Discretionary Income Should Be Taxed.

Only "Discretionary Income" Should Be Taxed Under A System Of Progressive Taxation.

There is an economic concept known as "discretionary" income. This refers to money that people earn which is above and beyond what they need to pay for their basic living expenses.

For example, let's say someone earns $3000/month, $36,000/year. Let's say further that the minimum it would cost this person for housing where they live is $1200/month; health insurance $200/month; food $400/month; car insurance, gas, amortized portion of purchase and repairs $250/month; other utilities such as gas, electric, trash, phone, $150/month, dental $50/month, clothing $50/month, personal products and cleaning supplies $100/month (shampoo, toothpaste, toilet paper, paper towels), and $100/month for an emergency fund. That means $2500/month is the minimum amount this person needs to pay their basic living expenses, without any extras. That means this person has $500/month, $6000/year in "discretionary" income.

Let's take another person earning $120,000/year, $10,000/month. Using the same figures, this person would have $7500/month in "discretionary" income. They could live reasonably on $2500/month, and therefore can do what they want with the $7500/month additional income. It is within their "discretion" to decide whether to save it or spend it and, if they spend it, whether to buy something of long-term value or buy expensive clothes that will have no value within two years. It is entirely within their discretion.

One approach to a progressive system of taxation is to set up a basic amount which is required for somebody to live reasonably every month. In this scenario, I have assumed $2500 is the minimum cost to live reasonably in a month. In a progressive tax system, the first $2500 of somebody's monthly income should not be taxed because, by definition, $2500 is the minimum each person needs to spend in order to have a reasonable life, to pay for the reasonable necessities of shelter, food, medical and dental, modest clothing, and transportation.

Assuming each person needs $2500/month for basic living expenses, that amount should be deducted from their gross income before any taxes are owed. The "standard" deduction from gross income, for purposes of calculating taxes, should therefore be the minimum amount they need to reasonably live:  $2500/month, or $30,000 per year for a single person. Obviously for married couples, and people with children, each additional person in the family would "cost" less than the $30,000 for the first person. The second person's "costs," in other words, might only be $20,000, since they share the cost of the housing, utilities, and certain other expenses.

If the standard deduction was $30,000 for a single person, then anyone earning $30,000 or less would pay no taxes. Which is how it should be if it requires $30,000 for somebody to live with minimal standards. It's not the fault of the citizens that the cost of living has gone up so dramatically. The standard deduction, unfortunately, is frozen at some unreasonable figure which doesn't even come close to representing what it really costs for somebody to have a minimal lifestyle in this country.

Taxes should only be applied to discretionary income. The percentage of taxes should be progressive, or progressive upwards to reflect the higher income. For example, the first $10,000 of discretionary income might have a 10% tax rate. Everything between $10,001 and $30,000 of discretionary income might have a 20% tax rate. Everything between $30,001 and $70,000 would have a 30% tax rate, and so on. All income (regular and capital gains combined) above the amount of $250,000 should be taxed at 90%, at least until our nation has paid for the bush-cheney wars, we have rebuilt our infrastructure, re-invested in our schools and education, hired back the teachers, cops and firefighters, and other public employee workers who have been fired, and put everyone back to work. Somebody earning $550,000 for example, would be taxed a progressive rate for everything above the minimum living standards, but would also be taxed at 90% of the $300,000 above $250,000.

So somebody earning $60,000 would pay $1,000 (10% of the first $10,000 of discretionary income, the amount between $30,000 and $40,000) plus $4,000 (20% of the amount between $40,001 and $60,000), for a total tax of $5,000.  The money that would be saved by most working people would also be spent locally, in their own communities, which creates jobs for our neighbors.

Sounds low? Only because we're used to having so much of the tax burden transferred from the rich and the businesses to working Americans because of the tax changes under Reagan and Bush. They changed the tax structure so that the rich pay less, businesses pay almost nothing, and working people have to pay more and more taxes because of tricks like not raising the standard deduction to reflect the actual cost of living.

A progressive tax system, which we theoretically have, "progresses," starting at a low tax rate for low incomes, and going up to a high tax rate for higher incomes. What we have in our country is a system in which rich people and businesses have paid so much money in bribes to the politicians that our tax laws have been re-written so that everything is now regressive, not progressive. Sales taxes, for example, are regressive.

Let's take a state sales tax of 10%, for example. The person earning $24,000/year could easily spend 1/3 of that income buying items which are subject to the sales tax, so they end up paying 10% of $8,000, or an additional $800/year on sales taxes, let's say an additional 3% of their gross income is paid out in taxes. But for the person earning $120,000/year, most of what they do with their money is not subject to sales taxes, since much of the money is "invested" in real estate, or other investments to which sales taxes do not apply. So that person could end up spending under 1% of their income on sales taxes. Sales taxes are regressive, since they force lower-income people to pay a bigger percentage of their income in taxes, while the rich pay less.

The reason that more Americans are broke is not because we are stupid, or even uneducated. There is a big push on now by the politicians and the business community to claim that the reason we have high unemployment is because we need to have more education for "our" workers so "we" can compete. This is such garbage. A pack of lies. Tech companies, for example, go to India and Pakistan and recruit computer engineers to come to the U.S. and work on H1b visas, because they can pay them $11,000/year less than they would pay an American. In the meantime, well-educated American engineers in the computer as well as other fields have all been thrown out of work by U.S. corporations simply because the CEO wants cheaper labor.

The same is true in the building trades, with many highly qualified and well-trained Americans thrown out of work and replaced by truckloads of unauthorized migrant workers brought into the country by coyotes. 

Most major hospitals have an entire department devoted to getting h1b visas and bringing in planeloads of nurses and similar medical workers from countries like the Philippines, because they are paid much less than Americans are.  In the meantime, the community college systems which used to turn out nurses with excellent two-year programs now have five year waiting lists, so jobs that could be filled by Americans, and Americans who are eager to do the work, are instead given to low-paid foreign workers.  This is the flip side of outsourcing jobs.  Nobody should be allowed to hire foreign labor for a job inside this country unless and until we have full employment for all Americans.

There is a systematic program in place in this country to throw more people out of work, eliminate taxes and all regulations which otherwise apply to businesses, cut the taxes for rich people, and steal everything that working people have, including pensions, savings, and homes. All of it has been looted and taken by the wealthiest and most powerful people in our country.

Another scam used by the rich to avoid paying taxes is the "personal" charity.  People like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Bill Clinton, set up their own personal charities.  Then they take part of their income every year and put it into their "my charity" account, and don't pay taxes on it.  As long as they pay out 5% of the money from the charity account to actual charitable purposes every year, they do not pay taxes on the rest of the money.  If you're earning 10% or more on your money, you can see that this is little more than a scam to allow the rich to accumulate large amounts of money tax-free.  What can they do with that money?  They use it to acquire interests in industries where they want some control.  Bill Gates, for example, has used his charity money to buy into the field of Genetically Modified Organisms (Frankenfood), to hold conferences on privatizing education so private corporations seize our education money and create WalMart schools for the kids.  Every person should be limited to a $500 tax deduction for charitable contributions.  Pay your taxes to this country.  After that, if you billionaires are feeling a little generous, give some of your money to the poor. 

The tax system has been changed to allow the rich to pay less, and force most Americans to pay more. Then the tax money that we do pay is taken away from us, away from our communities, and sent instead to pay for wars, to support dictatorships around the world, to pay thugs to stage coups and overthrow other governments, while our schools and bridges and freeways are allowed to deteriorate.  Our country is in a state of collapse because the rich no longer pay taxes, and the government spends all our money on wars fought to benefit Wall Street and the corporations.  You notice we don't invade countries unless they have oil or other resources that U.S. corporations want to steal. 

Changing the tax system would be a good place to start in trying to save our economy. If we started taxing the rich and businesses, we could begin the process of paying down the debt and investing in our own country again.